A quarter of the way into the new century, Europe's challenge has shifted from generation to connection. As of 2025, renewable and hybrid projects totalling around 1,700 gigawatts were stuck in connection queues across 16 EU member states and Great Britain. This is more than six times Germany's total installed generation capacity. In Spain, the transmission system operator REE reports that 99 percent of the 200 gigawatts of available grid capacity is blocked.
There's an obvious answer to this problem: to stop waiting for more connection capacity and use what already exists more efficiently. That is precisely what a hybrid park does, pairing wind and PV, often with storage, at a single shared connection point. It's a technically feasible and economically plausible model, and is already permitted in several markets. And yet it remains rare across Europe.
The technical case
As a starting point, it‘s uncontroversial. PV delivers around midday and in summer, wind often at night and in winter, and together the feed-in smooths out. A connection point is only partly utilised over time by a single technology. Two fill it more evenly, lifting the capacity factor without a single metre of new line. Overbuild the connection to 150 percent and curtailment losses run around one percent; at 250 percent, around six. There's also one grid connection instead of two, as well as shared transformer stations and unified operations management.
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This is more than a model calculation, as a German project north of Bayreuth shows. BayWa r.e. added a 22 MW solar park to the connection of an existing 24 MW wind farm, wind taking priority. Curtailment on the solar side runs at under two percent, achieved five years before Germany had even regulated what is now known as cable pooling.
What is holding it back
So why do so few of these parks exist? The answer is unspectacular, and it's now on record in a European Commission document: guidance on the December 2025 Grids Package, which identifies the core problem, that in several member states there's no dedicated procedure for registering additional generation at an existing connection point. Any additional capacity must apply for a new grid connection, in some cases even where the agreed connection capacity is not exceeded. Add PV to a wind farm, and you'll queue behind the very projects you'd help unblock, exactly what the Commission says is slowing build-out.
There's also the permitting process itself. Wind and PV usually need two separate approvals, and anyone wanting both on one site has to synchronise timelines that operate in isolation from one another. Areas designated for wind, meanwhile, aren't automatically appropriate for PV.
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And then there's the grid operator. A 2025 study by the German Environment Agency, looking at why so few hybrid projects get built, puts it plainly: a shared connection depends on detailed dialogue with the operator, and if they're unwilling, planning can fail before it starts. The pattern holds well beyond Germany, wherever a framework allows hybridisation but never requires it.
Where rules do exist, they're often demanding. In Germany, for instance, sharing an existing connection point requires the other operator's consent, and the flexible connection agreement also demands joint and several liability, meaning two differently financed partners must answer for one another. On top of that come separate metering concepts and billing models, which grow less transparent with every operator added.
How Spain got ahead
Compare the markets and the pattern becomes clear: this comes down to procedure. Spain is furthest ahead. As early as 2020, "hibridación" was regulated, letting operators of existing plants with a valid grid access permit feed additional renewable modules or storage into the same connection point.
What matters is the design. No new permit is required. Updating the existing one is enough, through a shortened procedure with halved processing times and halved guarantees. The usual strict queue order doesn't apply either. Spain treats the hybrid as a further development of an existing project, precisely the gap the Commission criticises elsewhere.
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The Netherlands relies on flexible connection agreements. According to transmission system operator TenneT, non-firm connection agreements have already released 9.1 GW of grid capacity, around 40 percent of national peak demand. By November 2025, 15 EU member states had created corresponding frameworks; Hungary, for instance, actively promotes co-location.
Great Britain shows the downside of well-intentioned reform. At one point, the queue had grown to more than 700 GW, prompting a radical response: away from first-come, first-served, towards "first ready and needed, first connected." By December 2025, 283 GW had a Gate 2 offer with a binding connection date. For hybrid projects, this has an awkward side effect: capacity is capped by zone and technology, so only one element of a hybrid or co-location scheme can be prioritised, a trade-off NESO accepts deliberately. A procedure built to clear queues can end up pulling hybrid parks apart. At least Europe is moving: the Commission now recommends alternatives to first-come, first-served, including transparent maturity criteria and regular queue clean-outs.
What makes hybrid parks attractive for PPAs
The second driver comes from the market, and it works across Europe: the capture rate, the price achieved divided by the baseload price, erodes wherever one technology dominates. Across 2025, annual solar capture rates in Germany, Spain, France and Greece fell to between 50 and 60 percent; in Germany the figure averaged around 54 percent, down from 98 percent in 2022, with monthly lows of 43 percent in May and 44 percent in June. Wind holds its value far better, capturing roughly 90 percent of Spain's average price in 2025 against solar's 54 percent. Anyone marketing only one technology tends to sell when everyone else is doing the same.
Buyers chasing value, not price, in Europe's PPA market
This is where hybrids come in. A "hybrid PPA" pairs generation with storage; a "combo PPA" pairs two types of generation, both aiming for a delivery profile closer to baseload. Solar plus wind delivers a steadier curve than solar alone, and offtakers pay better for steadier delivery. A co-located storage unit can lift the capture price by up to around 30 percent compared with stand-alone PV.
The market confirms this. From isolated offers in 2022, more than 170 hybrid offers had accumulated by the end of 2025 on one large European marketplace alone, with the focus on countries carrying high cannibalisation risk, such as Spain and Germany, where PPAs totalling more than 1.3 GW combining both technologies were concluded within a single half-year. Here, too, there is a downside: pairing a PPA with storage raises valuation and revenue uncertainty, and each component is hard to value alone, let alone together. Many projects stall simply because the numbers are too hard to pin down.
What project developers should take from this
The real obstacle is coordination: two permitting procedures, two operators, one grid connection, one contract. Grid connection strategy, consent and liability should be decided early in a project, not left until the end. The marketing structure feeds back into the design in turn: anyone aiming to deliver a baseload-like PPA profile will dimension differently from someone who feeds in and hopes. In day-to-day project development, it's this early clarification that decides feasibility.
Build-out is accelerating; connection capacity is not. Whether hybrid parks emerge from their niche comes down to procedure. The Commission has named the problem. The member states must now deliver the fix. (Philipp Rasche/hcn)
A full list of references is available on request.
